FOLLOWING UP

By Joseph P. Fried

Published: May 26, 2002

After Success Story, A Brutal Relapse

It was a real-life story heavy on hopefulness and headed for Hollywood. Then the reality turned tragic.

In the 1980's, Michael B. Laudor, an employee of a management consulting firm in his 20's, began experiencing symptoms of schizophrenia, which became so acute that he was hospitalized for eight months. Afterward, with medication and therapy, he was able to enter Yale Law School, where he excelled, graduating in 1992.

Widely cited as a role model for those battling schizophrenia, Mr. Laudor signed a book and movie deal in 1996 worth $2.1 million. But two years later, with the book unfinished and the cameras yet to roll, he stabbed his pregnant fiancée to death in their Hastings-on-Hudson home.

Psychiatric experts said he had stopped responding to medication and, severely delusional again, believed that his fiancée, Caroline Costello, was a ''robot'' or a ''doll'' conspiring to kill him. A judge accepted his plea of not responsible because of mental disease, and committed him to a high-security state mental hospital until he could be deemed no longer dangerous.

These days, Mr. Laudor, 39, is in the Mid-Hudson Forensic Psychiatric Center in New Hampton, N.Y. The State Office of Mental Health said last week it could not disclose any patient's condition.

His brother, Daniel Laudor, said Michael had ''obviously improved'' since the killing, but was ''obviously worse'' than when he graduated from law school.

For the Costello and Laudor families, the aftermath has included not only struggles with grief, but struggles with each other. The Costellos sued the Laudors over matters like Ms. Costello's life insurance and retirement savings, for which she had named Michael as the beneficiary.

They wanted the assets, her father, William Costello, said last week of the Laudors. ''They told us otherwise and were deceptive.'' Daniel Laudor said his family had always agreed that those assets should go to the Costellos, but ''they constantly changed their lists of demands.'' The litigation was recently settled, with the details under court seal, the men said.

The planned movie was scuttled, but those who were to make it, Imagine Entertainment and the director Ron Howard, went on to make another battle-against-schizophrenia film, one with an uplifting ending: ''A Beautiful Mind,'' inspired by the math genius John Forbes Nash Jr.

Bound by Words And Loving It

When Books & Company, a Manhattan bookstore both renowned and running in the red, closed in 1997 after 20 years, it left many book lovers with a hole in their world and the owner, Jeannette Watson, with a gap in her life.

The store, on Madison Avenue near 75th Street, just steps from its landlord, the Whitney Museum of American Art, had been losing $100,000 a year, according to Ms. Watson. The Whitney said publicized proposals to keep it going were not viable.

''I got very depressed away from the books and all the people,'' Ms. Watson recalled last week. But now her blues are gone: she runs a book shop again, having bought the Lenox Hill Bookstore, on Lexington Avenue near 73rd Street, in August.

''This store is profitable,'' she said. It is also different. ''Books & Company was a destination for people,'' she said, who were attracted by offerings like its university press and its many philosophy works. ''This is more of a general bookstore, geared to the likes and dislikes of the neighborhood.''

As for her career's current chapter, ''I feel as if I've come alive again,'' she said.